The Afterward: A Story About Chairs
by Next to Something
Summary: Vengeance. And afterward, this cell. Lokane, just dark enough, complete.


**A/N: **Written for **Grissy** as a part of the Starfrost Exchange on AO3.

Thanks to **thereallimegreenandloki** on Tumblr for beta reading this for me! Any mistakes are my own.

To Grissy, I hope you like my humble offering for a darker Loki, a darker Jane, and a darker (almost) romance.

**.oOo.**

_Vengeance. And afterward, this cell._

* * *

Loki sits in a chair. It wobbles something fierce since he sent it careening across his cell into the walls that provided no privacy for his grief.

(The first time he was locked in this cell.)

He has to sit still as the dead to keep it from rocking.

But stolen relics don't move much in their displays.

* * *

Jane sits in a chair. Years of perching on lab stools have her seated near its edge, doctoral posture unconsciously curving her spine into something less than comfortable. The chair is as large and inviting as her boyfriend-cum-prince's arms, swathed in the same opulent scarlet.

And as with Thor, she can't relax into its comfort.

* * *

Loki bargained once for a seat with a view.

This one faces a blank wall.

* * *

The only one with a better view of the cosmos than Jane would be the golden gatekeeper. Thor made sure of that.

* * *

Death would be better than this. There is infinite more thrill in dying than sitting in silence. And oh, did Loki deserve death. After his pretender to the throne, Odin-guise campaign went pear-shaped, the fact that Loki wasn't executed was very telling of his brother's inadequacies as heir apparent.

Patricide was arguable. Regicide was not.

Thor was a fool, still grasping at the romantic idea that his ne'er-do-well brother was worth the shelf space. Thor's sentiment won Loki his dull, captive life. Tedious Asgardian protocol won Loki his punishment.

It was Thor's unsurprising impulsiveness that won Loki his saturninity.

(The spite of both parents freshly dead can drive a hammer-wielding demi-god to utter cruelty. Using this still new grief as a petty barb had proved a miscalculation on Loki's part.)

Loki was caged, as promised. Magic-less, as expected. And, the victim of the cruelest of alchemies, gifted a leaden tongue where a silver one used reside.

A mute Loki was the truest impotency, and Thor left him to rot.

* * *

Saying that Jane is rotting is too cruel an assessment. Neglected, too maudlin.

Forgotten is probably closer to the truth.

She rises from the chair and leaves the stars to fend for themselves.

* * *

What pleasure the Midgardian gets from these daily visits, he can't fathom.

But he marks his days by her pilgrimage. The mousiest of suns to illuminate his dreary existence.

(He'd never tell her he looks forward to her visits, even had he a voice to speak it.)

* * *

She doesn't know why she comes to his cell, day after day. He isn't much company, and from behind magicked glass, she isn't much comfort.

Perhaps it's to assure him that someone can see him.

(Or to assure herself that she is capable of being seen.)

* * *

He always stands close to the glass. To scare her. To cow her. To study her better.

He imagines what her hair might smell like, but only because he longs for something, anything beyond the clinical clean of his cell.

* * *

Dark and slow moving as the starry night, he's a silent subject she can watch for hours. It isn't polite to stare, but what else is she going to do?

Talk?

* * *

Sandalwood, probably. Or something banal, like lavender.

* * *

"Can you hear me?" she asks on a whim. She doesn't know. Maybe this glass is thicker than it looks. Or maybe he's been stripped of that sensory ability, too.

* * *

Her question startles him. Her voice startles him. She startles him, and he opens his mouth as if he could actually answer her. The dry, scratchy sound of a wind that has not the power to fill even the smallest of ship's sails wheezes from him instead, and he closes his mouth.

And nods his head.

* * *

Jane doesn't say anything else. The horrible sound that almost hisses from him makes her palms itch. He had a great voice. He is an absolute jerk-worse than! A murderer, a usurper and a total freak.

But did he have a great voice.

If Thor speaks as thunder, Loki was the rain. Relentless, affecting, an onslaught that could soak to the skin. Thor can rouse people to follow him through heart and gallantry. But it was Loki's words that could win him favor, inspire action and eviscerate hope.

It was half his magic, and Jane understands why Thor stripped him of it. To hear the creaking rasp of what was left was truly pitiful.

The God of Nothing Good to the God of Nothing At All.

He is still looking down at her. She leaves, feeling worse than when she came.

* * *

Loki sits in a chair. It rocks, and if he had his magic, he could fix it. He could make it appear a grand throne worthy of the arse it cradles. He could rend it with a look and leave only splinters to show that there once was a chair that dared wobble.

As it is, however, he has no magic. So he gets up. He rips the hem from his long tunic and lashes two of the legs together with the fine strip of fabric-the front left and back right. He tugs and winches until the wood creaks, but when he ties the knot, the chair stands firm on all four legs.

Loki sits in the chair and stoically ignores the tears running silent tracks down his face.

* * *

Jane looks at a chair. She's sitting in the obnoxiously large bed that is too big for her and the tree-trunk of a man she loves. It's absurd how too-big the bed is when she's its only sleeper. Thor's taken well to his role as King of Asgard; he's neglected his role as boyfriend quite a bit.

The worst part is that Jane doesn't really even mind. She's made good on her own for a long time, and she could again. But here, on Asgard, she's not just the crazy fringe scientist that got laughed out of Caltech.

She's the Midgardian that brought war to Asgard's doorstep and she's the tiny little nothing that put Frigga on a funeral pyre. She's the mortal that won't marry their king and who dissects their magic like it were so many laboratory frogs.

She's made good on her own before, but that was on Earth. Not even the strange stars can sway her in this: she does not belong here.

She crawls out of the massive bed, coverlets and all, and curls up in the chair by the window.

* * *

Loki sits in the chair that he fixed, avoiding sleep. He fills the cell with the sibilant keening of his ruined voice, forcing himself to make peace with the quiet racket. Peace does not come and the only thing that keeps him from smashing the chair beneath him is the strips of his tunic that are holding it together.

(It's the first thing he's fixed with just his hands since he was a boy.)

* * *

Jane goes back the next day, but this time she brings something with her. After sleeping in the chair proved less than comfortable, she got up and put her reeling mind to work.

She'd been practicing her next move all night.

Pulling the object from beneath the folds of her dress, she uncaps the dry erase marker that she always has stowed in her purse.

Haltingly, though not as haltingly as her first thirty attempts, she presses the tip to the glass of Loki's cell and writes backwards for his benefit.

_I want to help you._

* * *

Loki's throat is sore from his personalized torture of the night before. It aches further at the words scrawled across the glass of his cage. He only lets the warmth of Thor's pet's ardent gesture, communicating without her voice, touch the outer-reaches of his heart before lifting his finger to his teeth.

He rends the flesh not-too-easily and answers the chit.

_Go away._

* * *

He has gorgeous penmanship, if you can call words fingerpainted in your own blood actually penning anything. The pretty writing is marred by the gore.

She glances to the digit and sees it is already stitching itself back together. She looks to his face. Blood stands on his lips and is smeared across his slightly bared teeth. This makes her queasy.

* * *

He watches her go, scurrying off like the little mouse she is. His lips curl in a bone-deep satisfaction he has not had in a long time. He smears his words and revels in the feeling of winning, of fighting, of spurning those weaker than he.

He sobers quickly when he sees her words still standing on the glass. Those he cannot wipe away.

_I want to help you._

* * *

The next day she has a plan.

She pulls out the marker again, underlining her words from the day before. When Loki lifts his now healed, if a little pink, finger to his mouth, she stops him.

_Wait!_ she frantically scrawls.

(Miraculously, he does.)

She gestures with her own finger, lifting it almost to her mouth, before reaching out and pressing it to the glass. She raises her eyebrows, urging Loki do the same.

He eyes her speculatively, lifting the finger closer to his mouth. She quakes and he takes that as victory enough. He presses his finger to the glass.

Jane touches the tip of the pen where his finger presses, and waits. Loki does not move for several long seconds, and Jane almost breaks her personal vow to not speak. What she would say wouldn't be very nice anyway.

Finally, as she thinks the tip of the pen might dry out, he slowly traces out words on his side of the glass, and Jane's pen traces him, stroke for stroke.

_Go away, Jane._

* * *

(Even had he the voice, Loki wouldn't say it: he is glad she does not leave.)

* * *

_What's the matter with your voice?_ she writes. She's getting better at it, this writing backwards. Loki seems to do it with little trouble, and she tries not to let this ruffle her.

_I haven't one._ he answers.

Jane violently rolls her eyes and her legibility suffers for her frustration.

_No shit._

* * *

This is a much better way to fill his day, he decides. He quite likes this, exasperating her with a little mischief.

It takes several more questions, each more specific than the last, until he finally gives her something that satisfies.

* * *

_It's frozen. It's still._

Jane smiles in triumph. That is something she can work with.

* * *

Loki sits in his chair, the chair that he fixed, the chair that holds steady as he stares at the not quite clean glass of his cell.

That maddening woman had erased all but her original words when she finally left, murmuring something about the library.

_I want to help you._

* * *

Today, she comes armed with a book. She presses it open against the glass, distractedly writing out questions about different sections, peeling it off from the glass to peek at the page, and adding more questions to her list.

It has to do with wave length and vibrations, concepts she can understand if it was written with any sense of order. She needs Loki to translate. The scientific method was obviously dead to these people, all the really good stuff buried in flowery, frolicking, superfluous language.

_Magic._ he writes.

_Science._ she quips.

She underlines her last two questions with bold, squeaking strokes of her marker.

* * *

Loki sees what she is doing. He can already tell the direction she is heading and he thinks were he not so bent by the loss of what was his only worth, he might have thought of the same thing.

(Even so, he is afraid to hope.)

* * *

Jane feels it. That rabid, corybantic energy that surges around every waking thought as she closes in on a breakthrough.

On Midgard-no, Earth-this would be a discovery suitable for the forties, but here on this magical mystery tour, Jane is thrilled to just figure out what half the books are even saying.

Imagine what she could do if she could just talk to Loki straight-what they could come up with.

* * *

Their sessions become frantic. During the second week, she comes in dragging a great chair behind her. He isn't sure how she is even managing to get past the guards every day, especially to this secluded block of cells in the back of the prison. There is only one keepsake back here. And now she comes loaded with books, scrolls, a massive chair.

She stands on the palatial red chair in order to reach the top-most reaches of his glass, drawing out craggy pictures-

_Schematics._ she writes for the fifteenth time.

-and nonsensical strings of letters, words, and symbols-

_Equations!_

-and he reaches a long arm to trace his part on his side of the glass. He doesn't have to stand in his chair.

Their movements, their communications, become fluid. Jane writing out the ends of his sentences before he can trace them out beneath her marker, and Loki picking up in the middle of one of her sentences, leading her to trace his words rather than finish her own. Getting so absorbed that when they reel themselves in at the end of the day, they scarcely realize they've been standing only inches apart. They press into each other.

They are getting closer.

* * *

Mechanical engineering has never been Jane's strong suit, but in a foreign realm with even more foreign mechanics-

She upends a box of oddments onto the floor at the base of the glass. They both kneel there for hours, sorting, tapping the glass to get the other's attention and write something out, working in the most disconnected and yet synchronized fashion.

Smearing the glass. Fighting that friction. Starting a fire.

* * *

One day, he's waiting with his finger to the glass.

_How will I receive it?_ he asks.

This is the plan for which Jane needs no Loki. This is the plan for which Jane needs a Thor.

_You'll receive it._

* * *

"Loki likes to read, doesn't he?" Jane asks one night when Thor finally comes to bed.

"What's this?" Thor's voice is far away, as far as his thoughts, as far as the other realms he keeps visiting.

"I was just thinking, it might be nice if he could have some books from the library-"

"-I know that you visit him," Thor says. His voice is not unkind.

Jane doesn't answer. She knows she isn't exactly being covert, but she hadn't realized that what she is doing isn't a secret. She wonders how much he knows.

"I think you're too kind, Jane. Loki doesn't even deserve the quarter he has been given."

He's right, of course. Loki is vile, Loki is cunning, Loki would sooner betray her than help her.

(But Loki is as misplaced as she.)

"I'll send a guard along to ask him what books he wants," Thor says as he pulls Jane into his chest. "If that would make you happy."

"It would," she breathes, hating-just a little-how easy it was.

* * *

She doesn't visit Loki for days. He's mysteriously gained the privilege of book-borrowing and fills his room with seemingly benign tomes. There is much he desires to discuss with her.

(They were not finished.)

Her big red chair sits outside the glass and he imagines her curling into it to read a book he has picked out for her.

Where the hell is she?

* * *

When she does come, she's toting a large, weighty scroll. It is huge in her hands and she fumbles to unroll it. She drops it, her hands and arms shaking. She presses her hands flat into the glass, trying to calm her frenzy.

From his side, Loki presses his palms into hers. She meets his eyes and they are as troubled as she feels. She imagines she can feel the glass beneath her hands growing cooler, and leans bodily into it.

* * *

The glass where she touches seems to him to be growing warmer, though it is not possible. He rocks his body into it, seeking that singular comfort of touch.

Strangely, his breath frosts the glass.

* * *

(They won't talk of this odd moment. When they tried to learn something different through the glass.)

* * *

Eventually Jane tears away from their strange embrace, and retrieves the dropped scroll. She unravels it and pushes it up against the glass.

Loki reads it, confused. It's a recounting of a battle, of a narrow victory by a tired army from so many millennia ago. He raised his finger to ask her, but she shakes her head.

She writes instead.

_Ask for this one._

* * *

Though it pains him, though it is greater torture than he has yet withstood, he waits to unroll the scroll until she arrives.

It is a bit heavier than it looks.

* * *

When she comes, she is running. He is waiting near the glass, all pretense of calm set aside. She imagines if he were not caged, she would throw herself into his arms. She imagines she might kiss him, for the excitement she feels.

She slaps hands on the glass instead, and he meets her, gesture for gesture.

The marker is all but dried out, making only the faintest of marks, nearly transparent, as she writes.

_Open it._

* * *

He uncoils the ancient script, uninterested in the battles of a long past world. Had he any thought but to speak again, he would smile at the choice Jane has made. It does not occur to him that, like the desperate men of the scroll, Jane has sent him her own Trojan horse.

He is only interested in what is inside.

It looks much like the muzzle he was strapped into after being pulped by the great green monster. It is smaller, and crude, and fits not on his mouth, but rather on his neck, just beneath the cut of his jaw.

He presses the box onto the place where his voice used reside. The mechanism of the homespun salvation latches onto his neck, snug and pricking just so.

* * *

He looks to Jane, eyes wild, and for the first time in weeks, she speaks to him.

"Say something," she urges.

* * *

She looks lovely. Pressed so heartily into the glass, so intent on their shared goal. That same sort of wildness that is sending his heart racing.

What will his first words be? What mischief will he spin out of this clockwork cheat of fate they have erected together?

He drops to his knees before her, stroking the vitreous barrier between them.

"I burn for you."

* * *

She is silent for a moment, then two, looking down at the God-turned-man at her feet. Swallowing the rest of her fear.

There is a fire in his eyes that she recognizes. An ignition she can ride all the way out of Asgard and back to a place she might belong. Or someplace altogether new.

(She is glad he burns. They will need the fuel.)

"Let's get your magic back."

* * *

Yes, he thinks, a smile that could be cruel crawling from one corner of his mouth to the other. She sinks to the floor with him and her body undulates toward his barred hands.

A future promise he can use to his advantage.

(This is what he wanted all along.)

* * *

It is some time before anyone notices Jane is missing. The last place they look is not where they find her, but rather where they find a chair that used to sit in her room. She has not sat in it for a very long time.

* * *

Loki's chair, too, is empty.

The strip of muslin that he used to keep it from rocking is gone.

**.oOo.**

_**End.**_

**A/N: **Any and all feedback encouraged, desired, and absolutely welcomed.


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